Consumers must act! We must make demands!

Published 3:40 pm, Tuesday, April 15, 2014

We want our cows to lead peaceful lives in the rolling hills of our rural areas. We want to make sure they have not been injected with various chemicals. We want each of the cows to be issued a formal apology before it is slaughtered.

We want our chickens to be free range, even though we know that "free range" does not mean pecking about in a huge barnyard. We want Vivaldi played in their little hutches. We want each chicken to have a chance at happiness. And we want them killed in the nicest possible way.

We want our fish caught on individual lines by fishermen who have a sense of the ecology of the sea. We want no collateral damage to other species. We want to make sure that the fish are mercury free, or as mercury free as you can get these days.

We are consumers; we have interests. The purveyors of food listen to our interests. They seek to accommodate the marketplace. Around here, at any rate, and for a pretty high cost, we can get what we want, except the part about Vivaldi.

We're very careful about what we put in our bodies. We want everything to be sustainable, including our appetites. We eaters are part of a cycle, and we have an interest in making sure that other parts of the cycle do not hurt the environment.

But when we are consumers of marijuana, we don't ask any questions. Often our deals are with people who interest law enforcement. If we are Californians and we can buy medical marijuana legally, we don't quiz the salesclerk. He won't know anything anyway.

Instead, he talks about the pain-relieving qualities of marijuana. Or he talks about the nature of the high in terms so pretentious that they would make a wine writer blush. Not a word about its provenance, as it were. Not a word about growing conditions.

But marijuana is a crop, and its farmers use the same kind of things that other farmers use. Pesticides, for instance. There may be marijuana that is pesticide-free, but I've never heard of it. Google hasn't heard of it either, only questions from concerned users.

According to a very useful article in the Press Democrat, the paper that used to have "Santa Rosa" attached to its name, marijuana growers have been cited for letting pesticide runoff pollute the streams of Northern California, particularly in Mendocino and Humboldt counties. They have also been arrested for stealing water from the rivers.

Not that they're the only ones; as the drought worsens, water theft increases. Less water means more farmers in trouble. It also means ruthless farmers.

All this can be regulated, of course. The state's water crisis needs to be carefully managed. But it's hard to regulate marijuana farms because marijuana growing is illegal. Maybe around Northern California we're pretty mellow about the whole thing, but the feds are out there making raids anyway.

Growers maintain high fences, guard towers and watchdogs. Many marijuana farmers are armed. For obvious reasons, they don't want the federal government sniffing around. So when inspectors come to monitor the streams and the discharges, they can't get in.

It's impossible to precisely monitor water use. Everything has to be in estimates. Most authorities say that water use is about 6 gallons a day for mature plants, but marijuana growers say it's much less than that. On the other hand, Tim Blake of the North Coast Emerald Cup, a cannabis competition, says that each mature plant takes about 15 gallons a day.

The number of marijuana plants in California is unknown, but it's a lot.

There may be people trying to develop a drought-tolerant strain of marijuana, but I have not heard about them, even though a variety of marijuana known as Iowa ditchweed, among other names, grows abundantly as a weed throughout the Midwest, even in drought times.

Ditchweed is not (how should I put it?) very medical. But it does grow on only the water that comes from the sky. Surely there is hope for more drought-tolerant marijuana plants, but the federal government finances no studies. Studies would just encourage potheads. I guess that's the reasoning.

Water theft also affects fish restoration projects that have been going on for 25 years now. Some fish need freshwater to spawn in. If the rivers go dry, the seawater comes in. Tough luck for the fish.

If marijuana farms were part of an overall management plan, these effects could be monitored. But they're not. So it's up to consumers again (you know whom I'm talking about) to raise their voices, to demand a sustainably grown product. We want our businesses to be run in an environmentally aware way. Why exclude pot?

Do you know where your pot comes from? Do you want to know?

A constant howling and sneezing, and every now and then a great crash, as if a dish or kettle had been broken into pieces. "Please, then," said Alice, how am I to get jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

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